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Chocolate from Bean to Bar

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70 pointslxnn55 comments

This is very strange to see on HN this morning...I was bored last night while eating a piece of dark chocolate, and began wondering how exactly they make it.

I learned something fascinating: the primary thing that distinguishes "good" chocolate from "bad" chocolate, apart from taste, is the texture--more specifically, the crystal structure of tempered cocoa butter. There are in fact six different crystal forms of cocoa butter [0], each with its own unique properties. The "goal" when making good chocolate is to allow as many Type V crystals to form as possible, because they have the best properties (great texture, good snap, glossy appearance as opposed to matte, and the melting temp is higher, closer to body temp).

In order to form a majority of Type V crystals, chocolate is first melted at a high temp to wipe the slate clean, so to speak (all six crystal forms are melted). It's then cooled so that Type IV and V crystals can form, then heated again slightly to melt any remaining Type IV crystals, leaving only Type V. Wonderful stuff!

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chocolate#Tempering

Sounds a lot like annealing.

it's called "tempering", tempering and annealing are somewhat similar processes.

You can also do it by seeding, using chocolate with the right crystalline structure. This method is usually a lot less troublesome than the thermal shocking (tempering) approach.

You can also seed with the cocoa butter you add in, seeding with pre-tempered chocolate tends to require more added as far as I remember.

You can see them do this tempering process often when working with chocolate in The Great British Baking Show (in order to get the chocolate to be shiny).

Ah, but that's only the case for tempered chocolate! You can find a lot of the older style (stone ground) around, and notably, the Sicilian town of Modica has a 300+ history of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cioccolato_di_Modica

This was an interesting series of blog posts about a (supposedly) bean to bar chocolate maker:

https://dallasfood.org/2015/12/mast-brothers-what-lies-behin... https://dallasfood.org/2015/12/mast-brothers-what-lies-behin... https://dallasfood.org/2015/12/mast-brothers-what-lies-behin... https://dallasfood.org/2015/12/mast-brothers-what-lies-behin...

As a former chocolate maker for small, ethically-sourced chocolate company, this was both hilarious and disheartening to read about when it came out. The Mast Bros have kind of stood out in the industry for being tools.

Fascinating. One of the better bars of chocolate I ever had was a Mast bar with nibs. Later, I bought some of their other bars and they were markedly different. Having read this, I wonder which (if any) were actually Mast chocolate.

> Alright, so the cacao has some natural oil in each of the beans, this stuff is what is known as cacao butter, depending on how well we were able to grind this down, the cacao butter will express itself in the powder we have here. However, as you can see this isn’t very oily looking, so we will need to bolster this with cacao butter. To my 120 grams of cacao nibs, I am added initially 20 grams of cacao butter, (but added another 10 later).

This was a little disappointing to see. But I think it would be a great follow-up topic to show how to make your own cacao butter.

It's very difficult as you need a lot of pressure in order to squeeze the fats out from the mass - there were some small batch machines for doing so, but a homebrew approach would be marvelous to see.

Rotten episode on Chocolate is really eye opening about the staggering amounts of slavery, child labor, and corruption in the chocolate industry. Basically every brand you can think of is in on it.

https://www.netflix.com/title/80146284

But there are many smaller brands making excellent chocolate using far more ethical sourcing, at least a hundred in the US alone. The upside of this is that the quality is much better than Nestle, Hershey, Cadbury, Dove, etc.

While fair trade and similar designations are not a cure-all and mostly profit farm owners, they seem downright ethical in comparison to the slavery and child labor used by growers of low quality beans. The plain truth is that chocolate, like coffee, is expensive to produce. Source- I worked as a chocolate maker in the US. It really is a fascinating process. And as a bonus, many chocolate companies enjoy showing visitors the process. As far as industrial tourism goes, I highly recommend visiting one. There may be a high quality chocolate maker closer to you than you realize.

Is there something preventing us from cultivating Cacao beans in artificial environments(e.g.green houses).

Cost. It takes large orchards, and I would not be surprised if the surrounding ecosystem has some effect as well. One day, when energy is super cheap and superabundant, it will happen.

Maybe... but I am rather skeptical of Netflix documentaries (really, any documentary) and have a hard time taking their claims with anything but a huge grain of salt.

I did this once as I like to understand the processes that go into modern everyday items. Without a grinding mill I wasn't able to get the cacao to the smoothest consistency (it was grainy as the article describes), however it still came out as delicious pieces of chocolate. I did not add any cocoa butter, just sugar (and not much, I like it dark).

The process of shelling, toasting, grinding, conching, and tempering wasn't as difficult as one might think; I recommend curious minds to order some beans and try it out! It makes for a fun (and tasty) afternoon.

It's something I want to try one day. Did you write something about your experience like a blogpost?

Also used to do it too - amazing how far you can get with a £15 coffee grinder and a bag of beans. Like anything that goes through multiple step processing (same when I roasted coffee), it's the small percentage improvements at every stage that make the difference between home and manufactured.

countless plant and animal species have evolved and died out throughout the history of life on Earth

humans have existed only for a tiny fraction of the duration of the history of complex life on Earth

but somehow

humans managed to co-exist with chocolate, sugarcane, vanilla, bovids (cow milk, steak), coffee and any number of stupidly tasty things

I'm not going anywhere with this comment

but, like, wow, no!?

if humans had evolved a couple of million years earlier, or any of those stupidly tasty things had evolved a couple of million years later, we wouldn't have been able to experience them

> if humans had evolved a couple of million years earlier, or any of those stupidly tasty things had evolved a couple of million years later, we wouldn't have been able to experience them

Of course, it's very likely that there were other stupidly tasty things a couple of million years ago, and will be still other stupidly tasty things a couple of million years hence.

for sure, but if you could push a button to make it so, would you really risk giving up chocolate (or whatever you consider to be the tastiest thing in the world) forever for potentially something less tasty? :P

no right or wrong here, just an honest and silly question

I know I wouldn't risk chocolate, coffee, beer and wine for anything

Makes me wonder how many insanely taste things we are not experiencing because they went extinct or have not appeared yet. Defiantly there are way way more than the ones that we happened to overlap with.

no right or wrong here, just an honest and silly question

I know I wouldn't risk chocolate, coffee, beer and wine for anything

I would be happy if supermarkets stocked more than one or two of the blandest varieties of most foods. There's plenty of existing tasty foods you don't get to experience.

Just had a long conversation about morel mushrooms last night. They fit nicely in this category. Hands down the best mushroom I’ve ever eaten.

Probably because they look like a brain on a stick.

There are thousands of mindblowingly delicious fruits that are simply incompatible with modern supply chains so most people don't even know exist. I recommend "Weird Explorer" on youtube to get a small glimpse.

Nice! Will check that out. I just saw a thing yesterday about nutmeg, the fruit it comes from and the 'mace' which is a beautiful webbing around the pit. Never heard of any of it.

Wow, it is beautiful! [1]

In the US it might be most commonly encountered as a primary constituent of Pumpkin Spice.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/63/Nu...

Farmers markets very occasionally will have interesting fruit, often I suspect as a side project for the farmer, sitting at the back of their stall for a couple of weeks only.

In Californian farmers markets and fruit stalls I've been able to get some relatively uncommon fruit with unique flavours: feijoa, persimmon, passionfruit, pomegranate.

Travel is another way to be exposed to new fruit via alternate supply chains. Most Americans have never heard of feijoa but New Zealand in autumn is awash with them! You don't even need to buy them cause everyone has a friend, relative or neighbour with a tree trying to git rid of theirs before they go off!

https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/04-04-2017/in-praise-of-the...

Just to add to your list a couple of delicacies from Mexico. Maguey worms and Escamoles(Ant eggs).

I ate some ants, primate style with a stick, to mess with my kids and some of their friends at a party. They were surprisingly tasty. I don't know if it was the ants or the pine tar that was stuck to them but something gave me horrible gas pains for a day lol.

Maybe fresh woolly mammoth tasted like ambrosia and unicorn spunk. There must have been some reason to hunt them beyond my ken; deer etc, smaller game seems much more viable otherwise.

Sure, if you want to be the wimpy kid in the group that goes for a measly deer while the rest of the group goes after a wooly mammoth, go right ahead. You will rightly deserve all of the flack the rest of the group gives. Peer pressure, boy, I don't know.

I'm all for bringing back the woolly mammoth and finding out.

Its the other way around. The things we eat don't have a flavour. Flavour is created by our minds. Thus we evolved to find these things delicious, not the other way around - and this way also no surprise that there are tasty things all around us.

That sounds a lot like "Screw it. Insert me back in the matrix."

I eat fruit every morning and am consistently blown away by how good these "wild" things taste. Amazing.

Humans develop slowly (long living with few children making long time between generations) than many other things (more rapid generations, more generations in same time) thus things that depend on their seeds to be spread become better more quickly than taste develops also the ones successful in that spread more.

In addition human culture consciously breeds the good fruits etc. just look how some plants have been turned into monocultures. Most bananas we buy are clones of a variant that was deemed good. For other things humans did centuries or even millennia of selection.

> if humans had evolved a couple of million years earlier, or any of those stupidly tasty things had evolved a couple of million years later, we wouldn't have been able to experience them

Proof that there is a God! /s

but we would have experienced different ones?

If we didn't have cacao we would have learned to get something awesome from carobs, if we didn't have bovids we might have gotten fat deers, etc

There's soooo much stuff outside the usual flavours and ingredients even today.

Protips for finding the best chocolate in any area:

- Look for "chocolate" shops, NOT "chocolates" shops! The latter tends to be confections / pastries, the former, bars

- Look for places with 90%+ bars (ideally a 100%). You might not like something that dark, but, it means that the source beans are good enough to stand on their own

- Slightly avoid places that put flavored bars (adding anything other than the core ingredients) front-and-center. They definitely can have amazing chocolate, and usually do have amazing flavors, but it does mean that they're not ALL about the cacao. (Don't even bother with "pressed" flavors; if it's not mixed in, it's gonna be mediocre).

- Look for bars that don't use soy lecithin.

THANK YOU. For showing how simple the process of making chocolate is. From most manufacture sites they make it seem so complicated.

Related - You could even skip the fermentation and roasting parts by simply buying pre fermented and roasted pods. Simply crush the beans, add your favorite milk and add sugar per taste. And voila! you can have the best chocolate you ever had.

The article brings this up, but I'd say that in general home "bean to bar" chocolate isn't worth it unless you have chocolate conche machine, which you can get for about $300-$500 online. Otherwise you're going to end up with something quite gritty with a bad mouthfeel.

Finding the correct roast takes some time as well. The roasting temperature varies between ~6 degrees Celsius and that variation can make a lot of difference in terms of the flavors that the roast brings out, and every type of bean is different. But I would imagine the process would be rather satisfying. I would add that a gritty feel is not a dealbreaker. There is a Mexican chocolate company, Taza? I think, that makes a more "traditional" grittier chocolate. It is quite enjoyable.

not sure how familiar you are with south indian cuisine, but the machine we use to make dosa batter also serves reasonably well for this purpose

> chocolate isn't worth it unless you have chocolate conche machine

This, like many other ideas about roasted bean products, is a silly universalization of some individual's arbitrary preference. It's like saying that all mushrooms _must_ be minced because someone didn't like the texture of whole mushrooms at one point. Or that coffee beans must be Arabica for...reasons...when billions of people preferentially drink Robusta.

I love unconched chocolate and strongly prefer it over conched. Taza in Somerville, MA is regionally famous for their delicious, distinct, gritty unconched chocolate.

I mean, yes, obviously a post to a public comment board is going to reflect my own personal preference. While I haven't had the particular brand you mention, I have tried many other versions of stone-ground chocolates, and they always taste like chocolate with sand to me. To each their own, though.

> I mean, yes, obviously a post to a public comment board is going to reflect my own personal preference.

Ok. There's a difference in public discourse between "I personally didn't like the feel of the unconched chocolates I tried" and a universalized claim about what is or isn't "in general worth it" for someone else ("you"/"you're") to do.

Saying that someone else shouldn't do something because you don't like it imagines yourself as the universal subject.

I personally like the grittier chocolates, but that might be uncommon.

I tried doing cocoa bean to chocolate in the past; I would say that it is not that great and consistent, but I can say that it feels like chocolate once you put it in your mouth.

Thanks for sharing this recipes. I was looking for something like this.

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